The Conundrum Of Doctors Maintaining Their Autonomy

One thing that the COVID era exposed was the degree of influence by the Pharmaceutical System on doctors and their ability to maintain medical autonomy. Of course, this is not something new. The purpose of the drug companies is to sell drugs; otherwise, they wouldn’t be in business. What is of concern is the degree to which they use coercion, sometimes subtle, other times not so subtle.

I encountered this form of influence early in my chiropractic career. Although chiropractors couldn’t prescribe drugs, some got into the nutritional supplement side of health care. So, it was not unusual for vitamin company salespeople to approach chiropractors to sell their products.

In my first year of practice, I was contacted by a few representatives. They came in to see me, and I listened to their pitch. One of the things that didn’t sit well with me was that the companies promoted buying their products in bulk and then selling them to patients with a profit margin of about 40%. Ethically, I couldn’t do that. Then, I discovered that practising chiropractic was not about nutritional supplements, so it became a non-issue.

I also discovered that the drug industry was adept at promoting its products to doctors in various ways.

A kickback system has been operating for decades. This is where payments or other forms of remuneration are given to doctors in return for practitioners promoting or dispensing a particular product or service. In times past, doctors were showered with gifts from drug companies like coffee mugs, pens, tie clips or flown of free trips to conferences. Here, the pharmaceutical company would promote its latest and greatest to push to the public. So, doctors are the go-between between pharmaceutical giants and patients. This is still going on today to the tune of millions of dollars.

Drug companies pay doctors over A$11 million a year for travel and education

We Found Over 700 Doctors Who Were Paid More Than a Million Dollars by Drug and Medical Device Companies

Commonly today, there will be dinner seminars where the doctor is wined and dined at no cost, a medical representative will present a topic and the latest treatment, and in a subtle way, the doctor can feel compelled to write prescriptions for the particular condition promoted. It’s really a form of pay-for-play. The drug companies are spending money and expecting favours from the doctors, which means more sales and income.

One of the most egregious products to come from creating an illusion of a problem was the use of statins to treat elevated levels of cholesterol. As many are pointing out, cholesterol is not the problem. That matters little to the drug merchants. Create a crisis, and the solution is a pill like Lipitor, which reduces cholesterol but does many other things. It causes side effects for many people. Here again, the drug companies bought influence, so doctors would prescribe these drugs.

Taking a Brand-Name Statin? Your Doctor May Be Taking Industry Money

“The research, which confirms earlier findings, suggests that if doctors take money from pharmaceutical companies, even just for a free lunch, they’re more likely to prescribe more expensive brand-name drugs.”

The pay-for-play scheme was fully displayed during Covid. The drug Remdesivir was hastily approved as a Covid treatment despite the fact it was shown to be ineffective in the clinical trial. Worse, it is a cause of renal failure. Hospitals paid $2340 for a five-day course of treatment. What a windfall for the pharmaceutical companies. The ‘health’ authorities approve a dangerous, costly drug that doctors used in the hospital and who reaped the rewards? It certainly wasn’t the patients but went to the company, Gilead. Doctors became middlemen for this toxic brew.

Of course, the most significant scheme during COVID-19 was the ‘vaccines’. The vaccine companies created a product that the Pfizer papers showed to be ineffectual and dangerous to many. The government-media complex gave it the seal of approval and literally put your livelihood on the line if you didn’t take the jab. Was this a win-win situation? No. Pfizer and Moderna won, and the public lost. Personal autonomy went out the window. We learned nothing from the Nuremberg trials experience.

Dr. John Abramson of Harvard Medical School is one of the few physicians who has exposed the conflict of interest in medicine in his book Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine.

The bottom line is that with knowledge comes autonomy. Unfortunately, knowledge is withheld not only from the public but also from medical doctors. So many would have never touched the COVID-19 jabs had they known what we now know. The information was kept from people, so they were guinea pigs robbed of their autonomy. It is a travesty that such a fraud was perpetrated on billions of people.